The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer: satirising the many shades of modern feminism

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Near the end of Meg Wolitzer’s zesty new novel is a seemingly throwaway paragraph towards which, nevertheless, the entire book has been leading. Cory Pinto, a high-flying Princeton graduate, has been back in his dead-end home town for three years, having abandoned a promising finance job to look after his chronically depressed mother after a tragedy tore his family apart. Greer, his former high-school girlfriend, is also newly back home, her career with a glamorous feminist foundation in New York in tatters. Greer dismisses the new life of her former flame, who once shared her callow ambition to change the world and who now cleans houses his mother used to clean. But her own mother demurs. “Here’s this person who gave up his plans… and takes care of [his mother]. I feel like Cory is kind of a big feminist, right?”

This moment, to me, recalls the conclusion of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” It’s a bittersweet echo, since much of The Female Persuasion is concerned with the achievements and failures of the modern feminist movement, from the Sixties to the present day, and most pressingly, with where the movement can go, now that many big battles for sexual equality have been won. Living quietly is absolutely the opposite of what many of feminism’s most ardent adherents have in mind, and in many cases quite rightly so, but Wolitzer is at her wisest when pointing out how a purposeful life can take on many forms.

Gloria Steinem in 1965Credit:
Life Picture Collection/Yale Joel

The Female Persuasion centres on Greer who, when we first meet her as an undergraduate in 2006, is in the mire of an instantly recognisable feminine adolescent crisis. Clever and frightened, with “furniture brown hair”, she is “hot faced and inarticulate”, and so “absorbed in her own unhappiness” she is “practically curating it”. She is also suffering the aftermath of a groping, which the college has summarily failed to deal with. But it’s a chance encounter with a famous feminist, Faith Frank (who bears several similarities to Gloria Steinem), that sparks Greer’s flickering political consciousness into a full-blown furnace. She emails Frank after graduating in the hope of working for her at her long-lived feminist magazine Bloomers. When that magazine folds (in part because of competition from new feminist blogs), she joins Frank in New York at a start-up foundation, bankrolled by a global conglomerate, that aims to fund special projects for disadvantaged women.

Wolitzer uses Frank, a totemic figure in the Seventies, to map the evolving contours of the feminist movement, facing stiff new challenges in the cacophonous new landscape of hashtag politics in which many of the old ways are considered out of touch. How to achieve coherence, and thus results, in a more liberated climate in which many more people have a voice, and thus an opinion on how things should be done, is one of the central concerns of the book. The foundation is persistently under fire from online feminists who, armed with all the weaponry of 21st-century diversity awareness, object to what it is and what it does with tags such as #whiteladyfeminism and #fingersandwichfeminism – criticisms that are breezily dismissed by the battle-hardened and undeniably arrogant Frank. Yet at the same time it’s pretty clear that Frank’s foundation, with its expensive offices and endless charity lunches, is achieving, in real terms, precious little.

Meg WolitzerCredit:
Hasselblad/Hasselblad

Wolitzer hasn’t written a feminist “how to” guide, of course. She’s more interested in the complexities of being female in an enlightened century that purports to be strongly supportive of women’s rights, but often isn’t. It’s an entrenched hypocrisy that exists at a micro-level as well as a structural one: blindsided by her possessive devotion to Frank, Greer betrays her activist, gay best friend Zee. Only when she discovers that the foundation has colluded with its paymasters in a dirty little cover-up over a women’s mentor programme in Ecuador does Greer find it within herself to walk out and forge her own path. Wolitzer’s project in the end is not political but humane: how, in an unequal, complicated world, where idealism constantly comes up against hard realism, do you stay true to who you want to be?

This is an unashamedly traditional novel of ideas, not afraid to boldly inhabit the moment we live in. Its social realism can, as a result, sometimes feel strenuously achieved and a fair amount of the dialogue about feminism is of the “I’ve just swallowed a textbook” variety. But Wolitzer has a good feel for the fast-flowing currents of popular culture: “Over time, [Zee] had begun to describe herself in a matter-of-fact way as queer instead of gay… For Zee, lesbian had gone the way of the cassette tape.” And she is excellent on the ways women – yes, still, many, many women – feel intimidated and made small by a society and an economic system they had precious little role in designing. Its conclusions, that feminist achievement isn’t necessarily about shouting the loudest or even always about affecting political change (although, in the end, Greer achieves great public success as a writer) may not find much favour with a modern movement that can sometimes appear more concerned with checking privilege than with listening constructively. But they are brave and useful conclusions all the same.

The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer is published by Chatto & Windus (£14.99). To order your copy from the Telegraph for £12.99 plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books. telegraph.co.uk